EVE New Citizens Q&A

Is the Breacher ship and skill books in "Skirmish" Content Pack any good?

I would like to do some pve missions and some pvp as well to learn the game.
I'd hate to waste training time on something that's not going to last very long in a battle.

Thanks for the advice!
Black Belle

EVE does not have unique things.

The Breacher is a common frigate, costing about 400k or so (which is a minimal amount of money; you get 10 million ISK worth of cash and ships from just the tutorial missions). As a frigate, it's ok at what it does, but frigates in this game are the throwaway ships; how cheap they are being their defining feature. People can go through 10+ frigates in an evening of play, trying and failing whatever they're trying to accomplish.

Looking at CCP's offer for the Skirmisher pack, the 20 extra days are worth $10, the skills, items, and ship are worth approx 1 million ISK in-game, and the 750 Aurum is worth $4. So basically the starter pack is worth it, but not because of the ship.

I'm sure I'll lose a lot of ships to learning combat tactics. At least it seems cheap enough to replace.
But from reading the forums, it takes a lot of time to focus training in this game. I don't want to be boxed into a breacher, then find out later I should have spent the time training guns and not missiles. :)

Training skills in this game is different from other MMO games:

1. You can pick any skills you want; you're not forced into a class (rogue, mage, healer, warrior) that doesn't have access to other skills.

2. You HAVE to self-control; training 2 races of frigates and their weaponry to 3 (sufficient to unlock Tech 2 armor, shields, etc. but not T2 weapons) takes, like, a week. Training to 4 takes a month and a half. Training to 5 takes almost a year. You only get a 5% increase each time, which is nothing. Clearly, the message is to stop yourself at "good enough."

So you're not going to lock yourself into the Breacher. The skill that unlocks the Breacher frigate unlocks ALL Minmatar frigates, so at the very least you have 5+ ships to choose from. And since you already train the support skills (armor, shields, navigation, etc.), the skill to unlock all Gallente frigates takes 1 day. If you don't like Minmatar, no problem, fly Caldari, Gallente, or Amarr ships. Or, even better, fly pirate ships (which require training two races, because pirates supposedly stole the technology from multiple races).

So the devs are making it easy and even enticing you to train multiple ships, and that's the point. Ships are rock-paper-scissors tools, and your character is a box of tools. In other games you're building an account with a mage, warrior, priest, rogue, paladin, etc., here you build a character that can fly DPS, tackle, electronic jamming, cloaked scout, remote repair, miner, industrialist, etc., all in one character.

If you're sensible about not training all the skills to 5, it takes a year or two, but that's because you're building the equivalent of a full account of characters, not just one.

Anyway, skills:

- ship skills - found under the Spaceship Command category, these unlock ships for you to fly
- weapon skills - found under Gunnery, Missiles, Drones, train the weapons that match the ships you're flying.
- support skills - Armor, Shields, Engineering, Mechanic, Targeting, Navigation, etc. - these make all your ships perform better
- non-combat skills - Trading, Industry, Corporation, Social, etc. - train as needed, some are quite useful

You can end up with 150+ different skills, all giving 5% here and 5% there, and the point is that when you multiply all the little 5%'s together, and fly the right ship for the job, you get a huge performance boost. If you fly the wrong ship at the wrong time, you'll likely die, but maybe the skills and how good you are at playing help you escape.

Yeah, strongly recommend what others have said. For at least the first two months your training should be broad as a new toon and new player. This way you can taste test a lot of different things and find what you like.

I did this and it worked well. I found myself drawn to the cruiser class of ships. They're strong/fast and can handle all foes at their size or smaller, while usually being able to run from anything bigger. So I chose to specialize in Cruiser skills, taking many to level 4/5 but usually only if they apply to multiple ships/weapons/modules. It was just a decision I made based on what I had fun doing at the moment. It was a great choice.

Now I'm working on finishing out pushing those skills up to Battlecruiser and doing some final polish on my Destroyer/Frigate skills.

On top of all of that, I'm still doing Planetary Interaction stuff, corp stuff, trading, industry and other things I need to train. Again, don't need to be a master at them to get moving, but it certainly helps to train a lot of stuff to level 2.

just dont get too attached to anything you undock in, highsec is only relatively safe , not actually safe.

I was looking at the Worm too. Looks like some nice bonuses on it.